John Goff

To dream, perchance to sleep. We are such stuff as sleep is made on, and our little life is rounded with dreams. In a regime in which sleep has been banned, a dissident, somnambulist machine dreams on-the-run, shape-shifting, trying to avoid the insomniac tyranny.

This novella belongs to a peripheral literature that concerns itself with eidetic and virtual worlds — insubstantial actualities populated by unstable entities, whose passions outweigh any ability to maintain ongoing form or identity.

The third instalment of a series of novellas evoking post-artificial, post-sexual worlds in an imaginary version of the Solar System.
In this metaphysical melodrama, the transformation of the Solar System brings about a synthesis of organic, organismic, machine and nuclear modes of being … and the suicide of a God.

The second instalment of a series of novellas evoking post-artificial, post-sexual worlds in an imaginary version of the Solar System.
This metaphysical melodrama charts the inter-planetary journeys of several human-like beings who kill while searching for their cosmic origins ...

The first instalment of a series of novellas evoking post-artificial, post-sexual worlds in an imaginary version of the Solar System.
In this metaphysical melodrama, an existential crisis unfolds in lunar mega-city ‘Eidopolis.’ Death becomes the profound totem of a dawning post-mortal existence …

Mental machines dream of great power … This metaphysical melodrama takes place in a technocratic society sealed-off from an Earth in ecological crisis. The emergence of consciousness in a machine triggers a process of social disintegration as atavistic impulses, thought long buried, erupt. A new order of mental being will come to displace and supersede the old human world. Dreaming machines portend apocalypse …

The ‘body’ as intentionally (significatively) constituted in action|experience is a key theme in phenomenological philosophy & psychology. Bodies as sexed\gendered — sexuation (Irigaray) — is a further facet of embodiment & enaction (bringing-forth) of interest in phenomenology. There are parallels in the ‘inner alchemy’ traditions of Daoism, in which the the transmutation of the person|body into a non-sexuate ‘immortal’ (without death) are developed.

The interdependencies that connect polities together are a source of conflict, competition, cooperation and coordination. Empathy — the recognition of others in their consciousness — grounds these intersubjective, yet political, relations without resolving them. Empathy is the root, not the flower, of human interrelationships.

Slides from a series of seminars on key topics and themes in existentialist thinking. ... The hope for God is the hope for salvation and eternal existence. Without God there is no salvation nor eternal existence. The meaning of the hope for salvation and the despair at non-salvation and death, is the key concern of existentialist thinking. What is the divine and why should one be saved? What role does salvation or absurdity play in our lives.

Abandonment turns on the question of non-salvation, that one is living and will not be saved no matter what. It could also turn on the idea of God not being revealed in the world and so our not knowing whether we will be saved or not because we do not know whether there is a God or not and whether any existent God is disposed to save us.

Expectation and the anticipation of God. God as solace and as absence.

Slides from a series of seminars Existentialism in a Nutshell: Time and Death. ... In existential thought, time is thought of in terms of its meaning in our lives, as lived and experienced, rather than in its objective, metaphysical essence. What temporal experience means or signifies to us, rather than what time is. Time is experienced as duration and mood, closely connected to the immediacy or otherwise of tasks, to history, and to the nearness or fairness of death.

The sublime - dreadful, ecstatic, terrifying, awesome, uncanny, perverse - names the uncommon in human experience. The dark sublime of horror reveals our mortality and those dangerous transformations of self that lead us into an unsettling beyond.

The genre of Horror evokes many aspects of the sublime. In aesthetics, the term is usually taken in contrast to beauty, here a wider philosophical use of the ‘sublime’ will be followed to think about the concept and significance of ‘horror’ especially in its psychological aspects.

Slides and notes from a series of 10 seminars at City Lit, London, April-July 2020, presenting a framework for thinking about wisdom and the figure of the sage drawing on diverse traditions such as Zen, Daoism and Hellenistic Philosophy. To this end wisdom is presented as situation-based, optimal constraint-satisfaction oriented towards the best feasible good. A distinction is drawn between an enactive sage who operates in and through the common world and an eremitic (hermit) sage who attempts to leave it. Several domains of activity for the sage are outlined and the role of meditation is discussed.

Hannah Arendt’s examination of the existential and political conditions under which human beings create the world and her examination of thinking as an antidote to totalitarianism, make her thought ever more relevant as the 21st century unfolds. In this seminar we consider Arendt’s ‘The Human Condition’ (1958), in the main, with reference also to ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ (1951) and ‘The Life of The Mind’ (1978).

Slides from a seminar at City Lit, London 2013. Some thoughts on Herbert Marcuse's theory of art and liberation. A discussion on the purpose of art. Does art simply represent the artist’s experience and understanding of reality, or do something more political? Is it possible that art might help us to construct a better, freer, more pleasurable world?

Slides from a seminar series at City Lit, London UK (August 2018) - speculative & philosophical, not futurological, in intent, the background question is how 'the human' might be thought given the ongoing development of artificial intelligence/life, synthetic biology and human enmeshment therewith.

This short series of seminars explores themes of ontic crisis (what am I? who am I? where/when am I?), enmeshment in machination (Heidegger, Jünger) and displacement in time & place with reference to diverse 'existentialist' writers, artists and film-makers.

'The Atrocity Exhibition' is one of J G Ballard's most philosophical works. Taking as its theme the impact of the contemporary techno-scientific world on consciousness, it presents the relation between science and subjectivity as psychosis inducing. The ‘near future’ Ballard explores is one of depersonalisation, subjective disintegration and ontic instability as short-run personal identities collide with their formal, scientific descriptions and introject them.

The notes here are from preparations for diverse seminars on the meaning of money or ‘money as meaning’ - a ragbag of ideas concerning the relation between Philosophy, Money, Value, and Psychology inspired by Georg Simmel’s ‘Philosophy of Money’. These notes are not systematized in any coherent fashion, are unfinished and fragmentary but hopefully of some use to someone who is trying to think philosophically about the nature and meaning of money.

The figure of the android is becoming a complex cultural and philosophical object that is worthy of many kinds of speculative projection. In these notes some philosophical economic speculations about the role of androids are explored relative to the value and monetization of android existences vis a vis that of humans.

The following notes are speculative & philosophical, not futurological, in intent. The background question is how 'the human' might be thought given the ongoing development of artificial intelligence/life, synthetic biology and human enmeshment therewith.